DEEPER THAN YOU THINK: CREATING AN ECOPEDAGOGICAL

DEEPER THAN YOU THINK:

CREATING AN ECOPEDAGOGICAL ARTS-INTEGRATED WORKBOOK FOR USE

ON THE CHICAGO RIVER

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in Art Education

Zachary Jacob Sabitt

Department of Art Education

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Spring, 2024

Thesis Committee:

Advisor: Andres L. Hernandez, Associate Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Reader: Sarah Ross, Associate Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

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Abstract

Many Chicago-area residents view the Chicago River as a living document of

environmental racism. The river has historically been a site of mass pollution,

industrialization, and transportation. This study encouraged people to shift their perspective

on the river by combining interviews, floral and faunal information, and arts-integrated

lessons into a workbook that encourages people to interact with the Chicago River through

collaboration with The Wild Mile, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to

transforming urban waterways into wildlife sanctuaries. This workbook contains lessons and

information regarding the river that can be used as a springboard for school groups who visit

The Wild Mile’s floating eco-park on Chicago’s north side, while also encouraging

individuals to explore and discover the river. A particular emphasis is placed on the role of

citizen science and how residents can investigate the environments in their communities by

using accessible tools to look deeply at what lives and thrives within aquatic environments in

the city.

In this particular moment within the climate catastrophe, many young students

succumb to a “doom and gloom” mindset that implies it’s too late and that humanity is

approaching a certain, doomed future. The workbook developed through this study provides

a resource for educators to have students engage with the Chicago River and create work

from their engagement. Students are also given resources to use what they discover and

observe to fuel existing databases. While experiencing a restored river space, students may

gain agency and become action-driven toward ecological restoration within the city.

The lessons carried out and discussed within were developed through various

methods. The lessons were first crafted as part of a summer lab group led by SAIC professor

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iii

Sarah Zhou Rosengard. The lessons were then explored through a collaboration with an

outdoor nonprofit summer camp, Project REACH, and reexamined based on results and

research before being integrated with another nonprofit based in Chicago, Urban Rivers. This

process has been guided by two main questions: How can art-making and citizen science be

combined in an ecopedagogical arts-integrated curriculum for engagement with the Chicago

River? and What are the learning outcomes when students create and use their own devices

to collect organic matter from the Chicago River to produce works of art?

More investigation should take place on these lessons and their effects on students

who carry them out. This workbook will continue to grow and change as more is discovered

about engagement techniques within urban environments and as feedback comes in from

educators who carry out the lessons contained within it.

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Acknowledgements

There are many people who I have to thank for helping me create this work. First and

foremost, a big thank you to all faculty members of the Art Education Department at SAIC

who helped me in various ways during this time. This includes but is not limited to John

Ploof, Rebecca Keller, Andres L. Hernandez, and Sarah Ross.

A big thank you to Sarah Zhou Rosengard and the students who were a part of her

summer lab of 2023 with me - Val Thompson, David Lee, Kennedy Schuh, and Jeff

Thompson. Thank you as well to Shana Wills and the incredible group of people at Project

REACH and all of the students of their 2023 programming.

A huge shout-out and thank you to everyone doing incredible work at Urban Rivers -

Phil Nicodemus, Maya Kelly, Sage Rossman, Steph Mueller, and Nick Wesley.

Thank you to anybody who has spent time on the Chicago River.

Lastly, a big thanks to my family for helping me along the way, particularly my

father. Most importantly, I could not have done this without my Masters companion Elene

Drosos, who read too much of what I wrote whenever I needed it.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iv

Table of Contents v

List of Figures vii

Introduction 1

The Chicago River: a Brief History 3

Outdoor Education: Moving Beyond Experiential Learning 9

Reacting to a Time of Crisis 12

Ecopedagogy and Hope 14

Incorporating Citizen Science & Arts Integration 15

Literature Review 18

Citizen Science: Community-Engaged Research Methods 19

Arts-Based Research, Empowerment, & Truth 23

Ecopedagogy Within Environmental Education 28

Methodology 33

Story 35

Bringing This Work to the Chicago River 36

Reflections and Recommendations 43

Futures 46

References 48

Appendix A: Lesson plan for trash pickup along the river bank or on a river boardwalk 53

Appendix B: Lesson plan for macroinvertebrate investigation 54

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Appendix C: Lesson plan for using microscopes to investigate river water 55

Appendix D: Lesson plan for creating a matter collector 56

Appendix E: Lesson plan for making cyanotypes from materials gathered off the surface 57

of the river

Appendix F: Lesson plan for making a Secchi Disk 58

Appendix G: Lesson plan for creating seed bombs filled with seeds of native plants 59

that can be tossed/catapulted into the river

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vii

List of Figures

Figure 1. A student holds a handmade Secchi Disk (a device used to measure water 39

turbidity)

Figure 2. A student displays their completed cyanotype 40

Figure 3. Members of the SAIC Water Lab (including myself) sit near drying 41

cyanotypes

Figure 4. Promotional poster created to advertise one of Urban Rivers’ community 42

events that consisted of the Water Lab’s lessons

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Introduction

During the summers of 2020 through 2024, I worked as a kayak tour guide in

downtown Chicago. During my tenure as a guide, I would carry out two-hour-long paddle

tours down the Main Branch of the Chicago River, as well as less formal one-hour-long

guided paddles down the same branch for people who were comfortable paddling with a

guide. Although I’ve paddled the main branch of the Chicago River somewhere in the range

of 500 times, there’s one moment from my first year of working on the river that I still think

about from time to time. It was a weekday in early September 2020, and I was working the

night shift for my kayaking company. I was assigned to the last paddle for the day, which

was a product we offered to first-time kayakers where one of the guides (in this case myself)

would be tasked with teaching a small group of beginners how to paddle a kayak, then the

guide follows the group and keeps them safe as they travel along the river. This intro group

consisted of only two people who were going in the same boat, a tandem. I was happy to take

a smaller group, as that makes it easier for me to actually talk to the people in the group and

get to know them a little bit rather than focusing on keeping everyone in the group out of the

way of any larger boats sharing the river with us.

The duo arrived and I introduced myself to them. They both seemed to be similar in

age to me. Great. Easy conversation, quiet night on the river, one of the ideal situations in

this job. Much better than a packed Saturday night tour with busy river traffic. I asked them

where they were from and they said they both grew up and still live in Pilsen, a community

on the near southwest side of Chicago. Like many people during the summer of 2020, they

wanted to get out of the house and do something after being locked up for so long and

figured they would try this out. I went through the usual safety speech and then a paddle

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demonstration, and once I saw they basically understood the strokes used, we were on the

river in no time.

They picked up the basics quickly, and we made it all the way to the farthest point

along the main branch where it reaches the north and south branches of the river, a river

intersection historically known as Wolf Point. When we reached this location, we stopped for

a moment, and the three of us naturally paused to take in the view. The magenta-orange hue

of the sunset reflected across the surface of both the skyscrapers surrounding us and the

reflective surface of the river, shrouding us in the warm light of dusk. From this spot, the

rumbling of engines and honking of horns could be heard faintly, yet seemed to dissipate

with the shrieking of cicadas nearby to create a synchronous orchestra of both nature and

city. In these moments on the river, I reached an almost meditative state, relaxing my eyes

and feeling the subtle bobbing of my boat up and down on the calm rapids of the river. I lost

sense of time, yet eventually felt myself “snap” back into reality and remember that as

enjoyable as this is, I’m still doing a job, and there are two people I’m responsible for. I

quickly looked over at their boat and saw the person in the back taking photos of the person

in front. They either didn’t notice that I completely zoned out, or didn’t care at all, as they

were also enjoying the beautiful view in front of us and taking in the scenery. I paddled up to

them and offered to take pictures of them both, and they happily agreed. I got in position,

snapped some photos, and airdropped the photos to their phone.

We quickly paddled back to our starting point. By now, it’s essentially nighttime,

with the last bits of sunlight fading. We got back on land and I said my last goodbyes to

them, chatting a bit since there’s not much to do at this point around the shop. So far, this has

been an excellent closing shift thanks to these two, but it wouldn’t really stick out in my

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mind until one of them said something right before they left. As I thanked them for coming

out, they thanked me for helping them get on the river, and one of them said something along

the lines of, “I would never have thought the river could be like this. We live by the river, but

we never really think about it or go to it because there’s no way to get to the river and it

looks really gross anyways.”

The Chicago River: a Brief History

I think a lot of people who live in Chicago don’t think about the Chicago River all

that much. The main association people have when they think of “Chicago” and “water” is

Lake Michigan, with good reason. Lake Michigan is an incredible marvel, a gigantic,

seemingly never-ending ocean of water that turns out to not be an ocean at all, but is instead

a fresh-body lake. The bike path along the lake makes it accessible to the public, and

Chicago’s busiest tourist attraction sits right on the edge of the shore at Navy Pier. Since

Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, Chicago has put a lot of effort into ensuring the

lake is a spectacle for the public to enjoy and make use of.

The same cannot be said for the Chicago River. Until relatively recently in history,

the Chicago River was treated like the city’s trash can. In 1833, the Odaawaa, Ojibwe, and

Bodéwadmi tribes were essentially forced to sign the second Treaty of Chicago, transferring

ownership of the lands between Lake Michigan to Lake Winnebago. This caused a mass rush

of Anglo-American settlers to come into the region and colonize it. As they did so, they did

not take note of the ways in which the Indigenous tribes of the land treated the waterways.

Whereas the tribes would dig latrines and basins for their human excrement so as to not

pollute the waterways they used for hunting, travel, and consumption, the settlers who

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quickly came had no such respect for the land and so they would directly toss all their

excrement directly into the river (Smithers, 2020).

This method of sewage treatment, or lack thereof, combined with the enormous

increase in population Chicago experienced through the 19th century, led to the quick

diminishing of the quality of the water. An 1885 article about the Chicago River describes

the multitudes of pollution entering the Chicago River at that time, saying,

At the present time the fouling of the river and its branches from the blood, offal, and

wastes of the slaughtering and packing establishments and their subsidiary industries,

has been materially reduced by the utilization of much which was formerly

considered worthless, and consequently was thrown into the river or upon the

surrounding prairies. On the other hand, the volume of sewage proper has increased

with the growth of the population and the extension of the sewer area, until a daily

sewage production, which may be roughly estimated at from forty-five to fifty million

gallons, is now poured into the river and its branches. (Rauch, 1885, p. 29)

Eventually, countless outbreaks of waterborne illness scoured throughout Chicago including

typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and E. coli. The origin of these diseases was eventually

traced to the Chicago River, as all the sewage and general pollution going into the river

would eventually reach Lake Michigan due to the natural east-bound flow of the river, where

it would then be consumed by the public as the lake was the city’s main source of drinking

water.

Faced with this dire public health dilemma, city officials knew they had to come up

with a drastic solution to stop these diseases from decimating the general public. And they

eventually did. In the year 1900, Chicago completed the largest engineering job of its time by

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completely reversing the flow of the Chicago River. Instead of the water flowing east into

Lake Michigan, the river (and the city’s sewage) would now flow southwest, out to St. Louis,

and eventually reach the Mississippi River where it would then go all the way down to the

Gulf of Mexico.

This reversal of the Chicago River further encouraged its pollution, as now the

pollution and trash thrown into the river would not directly affect the quality of drinking

water for the city. Industry and railroad transportation boomed along the river, as the river

being close to these operations allowed for a quick and easy disposal process for

contaminated materials. According to a University of Chicago map from 1926 entitled Social

Base Map of Chicago, by the year 1926 most of the Chicago River, including its main, south,

and north branches, were surrounded by either railroad yards or industrial plants.

Merchandise Mart was also completed in the year 1930, ushering in an era of large

steamboats and barges adding their pollution to the Chicago River as well when they used it

as a means to get goods throughout the entire country quickly and efficiently.

The pollution of the Chicago River remained relatively steady for many years. In

order to avoid the filth and pollution of the river, most of the high-income residents of

Chicago would remain by the lakeshore so as to avoid the disgusting sights and smells of the

river. The Civic Opera House, situated at the bank of the river’s south branch, demonstrates

the lack of desire people had to witness the Chicago River when it was created in 1929, as

the side facing the river has no windows. Nobody wanted to witness the river. Eventually,

industry along the river slowly shifted to other areas as the operating costs became too much,

leaving behind desolate skeletons of the factories and industrial equipment that used to be

there.

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In the year 1970, a few trends began to change in the city. First and foremost, the

federal government of the United States created the first-ever environmental organization

spearheaded by the government, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With federal

funding secured to do research and cleanup on the river, Chicago’s first non-profit dedicated

to the river’s restoration was created in 1979. That non-profit, named Friends of the Chicago

River, still exists today. For the first time since European settlement, the future was

beginning to seem bright for the Chicago River.

The second major change happening in the city was occurring within the

neighborhoods of Chicago. As restoration efforts began to ramp up in the city, so too did the

shrinking of the middle class and the widening of the economic gap. There are a variety of

reasons and theories that are still being discussed about the reason for Chicago’s shrinking

middle class and increasing income divide throughout its neighborhoods. A major contributor

to the slipping of the middle class that began in 1970 was a racial change that occurred in the

city. Many of the neighborhoods and areas that were considered middle class in the 1970s

were predominantly white neighborhoods. Due to white flight occurring throughout the late

twentieth century, with many white middle-class residents of cities leaving them for the

suburbs, Black and Hispanic populations in the city flocked to these depopulating areas. This

caused a decrease in income in these areas due to structural racism, as these middle-class

Black and Hispanic American populations would earn less in comparison to white middle-

class populations. (Lutton 2019)

While many areas in Chicago’s South and West Sides were seeing a decrease in

wages in comparison to the metro average, Chicago’s North Side was experiencing an influx

of high earners moving in. As more high-earning residents opted to build single-family

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homes to live in rather than shared multi-unit housing that existed previously, they also

began to push out the middle-income residents of those same regions. The property density in

these areas decreased, causing an uptick in property cost and higher property taxes on units

already bought by middle-income earners. The North Side neighborhood North Center, a

neighborhood located right along the east bank of the north branch of the Chicago River, is a

good example of this change occurring. According to a realtor of North Center, Kevin

Sullivan,

Sullivan, a realtor, has seen people buy half-million-dollar homes nearby that they

tear down to use as side yards. Two-flats, which middle-class families could afford

because of the rental income, are now regularly converted to single-family homes.

(Lutton, 2019)

What’s happening in North Center is an example of what has already happened and what

continues to happen in North Side neighborhoods all throughout Chicago. High-income

earners move in, buy up property that contains three-flat or two-flat spaces and convert them

into single-family homes and side yards, making it more difficult for middle-income earners

to remain in the area and further continue the city’s spiral into vast wealth inequality. This is

not to say that only high-income earners demand and deserve access to a restored river.

Rather, what seems to happen is the river becomes restored through local action and

advocacy, demand for housing goes up, housing and rental costs rise, and the people who

worked on advocating for the river to be clean and accessible in the first place are pushed out

to new locations.

Although the polluting of the Chicago River was a fairly equitable exchange - an

equal amount of industry, railroad, and pollution for all parts of the river - the cleanup efforts

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for the river which have occurred since 1970 do not appear to have been done as equally. The

largest restoration project that has occurred on the Chicago River was the creation of 109

miles of giant tunnels running underneath the ground which use sewage and sanitation flows

to divert sewage outflow into surface reservoirs, such as a quarry, to hold untreated water

during times of high water runoff. This gives the sanitation department time to treat the

water, eliminating untreated water from going into the Chicago River. This project, known as

the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP) began in 1975 and has since cost about $4 billion

dollars (Schein 2004). This plan has ensured that throughout the entire city, the amount of

sewage diverted into the river is much lower than before its construction. Though a high

price tag, this project is likely the largest asset against pollution in the Chicago River.

However, during extreme periods of rainfall, untreated sewage may still be diverted into the

river.

Though the TARP project has benefited the river throughout the entire city by

stopping most untreated water from entering the river, most other restoration projects have

not been as far-reaching. The project that has created the longest stretch of accessible path

along the riverbank has been the Chicago Riverwalk project, a nearly $500 million project

that converted the entire main branch of the Chicago River into a public walking path and

retail/restaurant space for businesses to operate (Moore & Zelen 2017). This project began its

construction in 1999 and was completed in 2017 with the installation of floating gardens

containing native plant species to the Chicagoland region across from Merchandise Mart,

which also houses the newest public art installation in the city with Art on the Mart. This

project is located in the Loop in Chicago, a neighborhood that contains a large business

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district as well as being a tourist destination. Due to its centralized location in Chicago, the

Loop is currently one of the areas with the highest cost-of-living in the entire city.

The Riverwalk is the most notable of a series of restoration efforts that were released

by the City of Chicago in a 1999 plan called the Chicago River Corridor Development Plan.

The city released this ten-year plan with the stated goal of developing, “a vision and set of

standards for new development that will increase public access and create new recreational

opportunities for all the city’s residents” (City of Chicago Department of Planning and

Development 1999, 2). However, despite this stated goal for all the city’s residents, over

2/3rds of this plan focused on the North and Main Branch of the Chicago River, with a lack

of resources and small sections dedicated to the city’s South Side. Likely in no coincidence,

this area was hit hardest by the increasing economic disparity of the city at that time.

As a result of the city’s inequitable focus on river restoration, there is now a disparity

in the lack of public access to the river. The organization Great Rivers Chicago did a study

recently on public access to the Chicago River and found that downtown and many North

Side neighborhoods have easy access to the river, while most of the South Branch, Calumet,

and Des Plaines rivers remain difficult or impossible to access. How are people expected to

connect with their local environments if they cannot access them in the first place? Where is

education for the environment happening if we cannot access environmental features closest

to us?

Outdoor Education: Moving Beyond Experiential Learning

Outdoor education is not a new concept in American education. At the turn of the

20th century, some lessons involving outdoor education were embedded into American

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curricula, however, these modes of outdoor learning had the primary objective of training

students about agriculture and plant production. It wasn’t until after the turn of the 20th

century that philosopher John Dewey began to question the form of outdoor education that

students received. Dewey argued for new forms of education that prioritized learning by

doing. This period was marked by a boom of outdoor curricula being developed and carried

out (Quay & Semen, 2013). These lessons were usually some form of a school camping trip,

or a walk to the woods, or anything that could be deemed getting the students outdoors where

they could learn through experiencing the outdoors.

The goal of having students get outdoors was to give them a form of experience that

they could reflect on to gain insight. This philosophy of experiential learning is still one of

the driving philosophies behind many forms of outdoor education. Many after-school or

summer camp curriculums are driven by the idea that having students engaged outside will

lead to them creating experiences from which they can reflect on and grow.

However, when examining the statistics and overall condition of youth and their

engagement with the environment, we must think beyond the limits of simply giving students

an experience with the outdoors. We now realize that the environment is not a closed system,

and we cannot only accept traveling to reach an outdoor destination (such as a national park

or campground), engaging with that destination, then traveling back home is pedagogically

sufficient. We must shift our understanding of the forces that contribute to our environment if

we are to address the negative feelings and associations that students have with the future of

our planet in the age of the Anthropocene (Anderson & Guyas, 2012).

As such, in recent years there has been an uptick in curricula and lesson plans that

emphasize teaching about sustainable development. “Education for Sustainable Development

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(ESD) largely emerged from Environmental Education (EE) models to teach how actions for

‘development’ positively and negatively affect our societies and the rest of nature, to then

determine how such actions can be ‘sustainable’ without causing current or future socio-

environmental oppressions” (Misiaszek, 2020, p. 615). These lessons traditionally are

focused on systems thinking, understanding how our environment is a system and as factors

within the system change the entire system begins to fluctuate. The goal of these types of

lessons is to activate awareness about sustainable forms of human development so that future

generations can learn how to build in a way that does not deplete resources from the planet

and minimizes the pollution that is added to the environment.

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a good first step to help students

understand our role within the environment and climate change. Still, some critics argue that

ESD does not go far enough in its teachings, and suggest ESD normalizes the neoliberal

representation of development (Kahn, 2008). Sustainable development implies that human

development and economic growth are natural factors in our society, and we must find a way

to make the planet adjust to our ever-increasing desires. ESD lessons do not typically

question the essential functions of a neoliberal society, nor raise questions such as: who is

this development for?; who defines what is and is not development?; how does development

affect the rest of nature’s systems?; who is allowed to thrive within this new development,

and who is left behind? To understand the complex answers to these questions, education

philosophy must shift away from ESD and incorporate ecopedagogy as its driving

philosophical force. These are questions that educators should be considering, especially

given the current state of environmental concerns.

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Reacting to a Time of Crisis

We are living in a time that many consider overwhelming. Young people living today

are reportedly struggling when it comes to mental well-being. Although many adults report

being stressed about the ongoing climate crisis, the issue has particularly affected the

youngest generation. A study of 10,000 children around the world between the ages of 16-25

found that 59% of respondents were apprehensive about climate change, with 84%

responding that they were at least moderately worried. In that same survey, 50% of

respondents reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty about

climate change. 83% of respondents report that they believe people have failed to take care of

our planet (Hickman et al., 2021).

With so many young people reporting these negative feelings and associations to

climate change and the future, common questions arise about what we can do individually to

help mitigate and respond to the climate crisis. Our phones allow us to connect with the

ongoing environmental disasters happening worldwide, whether hurricanes, tsunamis,

earthquakes, tornados, large storms, or any other ecological disaster that has occurred more

frequently as we continue to advance into the age of climate change. Yet even though our

smartphones have given us a front-row seat to the effects of climate change on our planet,

they have also increased the distance between ourselves and the crisis. When we watch

videos, read articles, and hear eyewitness accounts of the large-scale destruction brought on

by the changing climate, a distance can form between the effects and what we can do. This

issue can feel daunting, unavoidable, and unrepairable, especially considering that just 100

private companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions

responsible for climate change since 1998 (Riley, 2017). This figure implies that although we

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can make individual changes such as carpooling, limiting shower time, going vegetarian or

vegan, using biodegradable laundry detergents, and beyond, we can never really bring down

the global emissions causing the catastrophic effects of climate change on our planet.

To put it in simple terms, we are in quite a mess at the moment. This mess we are in

can feel daunting for us, yet students are the ones who are the most overwhelmed as they are

projected to live through the most substantial consequences of climate change. To decrease

the helplessness students feel regarding climate change, educators must begin implementing

aspects of ecopedagogy into our lesson plans. According to Kahn (2008), ecopedagogy is a

branch of environmental education that

seeks to interpolate quintessentially Freirean aims of humanization and social

justice with a future-oriented ecological politics that radically oppose the

globalization of neoliberalism and imperialism, on the one hand, and which

attempts to foment collective ecoliteracy and realize culturally relevant forms

of knowledge grounded in normative concepts such as sustainability,

planetarity, and biophilia, on the other. (p .8)

If we are looking to push students (and ourselves) out of this “doom and gloom”

outlook to begin thinking about how we teach about the current climate crisis, we must do so

with an ecopedagogical point of view. It would not be enough to simply teach about the

environment, we must instead contextualize our place within the environment and our society

and location to understand our role in the climate crisis. What forms of learning can be used

to engage with our environments in a way that acknowledge the socio-political aspects of the

environments we live in?

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Ecopedagogy and Hope

Ecopedagogy is a pedagogical philosophy that came out of Friere’s approach of

problem-posing education. Problem-posing education “is a collective process that draws on

the personal experiences of the learners, and that generates social connectedness and mutual

responsibility for the learning process, with potential for societal transformation” (Reed,

Saunders, & Pfadenhauer-Simonds, 2015, p. 56). Instead of succumbing to the sustainable

development lens and only teaching about the systems of the earth’s ecosystems,

ecopedagogy calls educators to delve deeper into systematic oppression and power structures

that continue to pollute and harm our entire planet’s ecosystem. Ecopedagogy argues for its

learners to contribute to the planet beneficially, doing more good to the planet than harm,

while also reflecting on the deeper actions that must be taken by our societies to heal the

harm that has been done through generations of industry and pollution. All environmental

pedagogies advocate environmental change, but ecopedagogical models, through a problem-

posing method, focus on the politics behind environmentally harmful actions, the normative

systems and structures of society guiding these actions, and the deeper, transformative steps

needed to end these actions (Misiaszek, 2016). Similar to how Friere argued for education to

allow students to dream of possible utopias free from the normalized oppression of a

neoliberal society, ecopedagogy uses teachings about the Earth’s environment and systems

learning to encourage dialog about socio-environmental utopias, comparisons of these

utopias to current socio-environmental conditions, and reflections on solutions to bridge the

gap between these two worlds in the creation of full education praxis.

Living in the realities of a world rife with mass shootings, social protests, and

misinformation, all constantly streamed to us in real-time, it seems necessary to approach any

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type of outdoor education from an ecopedagogical point of view. We can no longer ignore

the social dynamics which uphold our culture of consumption, waste, and pollution, or the

consequential inequalities which serve as their origin. In fact, we should all be dreaming of

sustainable futures where we no longer deal with these social-environmental issues, and

discuss solutions we can make on a local, national, and global level to achieve these goals.

Incorporating Citizen Science and Arts Integration

An arts-integrated approach is a useful way to examine the multiple layers and forms

of socio-environmental issues that ecopedagogical lessons attempt to achieve. Silverstein and

Laine (2010) define arts integration as, “an approach to teaching in which students construct

and demonstrate understanding through an arts form. Students engage in a creative process

which connects an art form and another subject area and meets evolving objectives in both.”

Many educators have begun to use arts-integrated curricula to approach traditional

forms of Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Math (STEAM) education (Liao,

2016). Having a STEAM-based approach to environmental engagement was the goal of the

entire lab team at SAIC when we created the lessons for the REACH summer program. By

gathering materials and creating a photographic representation of the material through

cyanotype, the goal was to engage the campers with the ecology offered within the city of

Chicago. However, as the cyanotypes were drying, I remember one student turning to me and

questioning what they could do with the pictures created. When I suggested that they could

keep it and hang it up somewhere or place it in a secure location, they seemed disappointed.

As if they wished the project could be pushed further.

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In the current age of education, many educators are beginning to use an arts-

integrated approach with their lesson planning to help students critically engage with their

lessons and encourage problem-solving thinking beyond traditional classroom strategies

(Liao, 2016). However, while arts-integrated curricula are increasing, ecological and

environmental art education still needs to be prioritized (Bertling & Moore, 2022). Citizen

science could be a useful tool to push arts-integrated environmental education in a more

engaging and ecopedagogical direction. “Citizen science (public participation in scientific

data collection) offers a unique opportunity for teachers to engage students’ critical science

literacy development as investigations that are situated on school grounds or in local

communities. Citizen science transforms where students do and learn science” (Huffington &

Scott, 2021, p. 2).

This all brings me back to the Pilsen duo who went on the water with me back in

September 2020. As they left, what one of them said stuck with me all night and offered me

many questions. Why did they have to come all the way down to the Loop, an area with high

business development and skyrocketing rent prices, just to get on the very same river that

also exists within their own community? Why did it take a pandemic to give them enough

time to finally enjoy this impressive waterway? Why aren’t there initiatives to change

people's perception of the river so it can be viewed as the communal, healing space it once

was way before the European conquest of the land? If we invest in the river, we invest in the

communities that the river exists within. The lack of access that lower income communities

along the river have is an indictment of the city and the way resources are allocated within it.

This line of thinking brought me to my desire to create a curriculum focused on the

Chicago River. Being a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago caused me to

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wonder how art making could be done as a reflective process for igniting engagement on the

river. The river is a place that can be looked at from multiple lenses: geography, access,

history, economies, socio-political inequalities, and so on. When thinking about engaging

with the Chicago River, I didn’t want to simply have students come to the river to make art.

There is so much to learn on land through exploring the river. I also wanted to combine some

form of agency to the artmaking experience. This mode of thinking led me to the discovery

of citizen science and its possibilities for allowing people to become agents of research for

their own environments. I then began to wonder if we could create our own devices to help

us critically examine the river and its contents. This led me to my two main research

questions:

● How can art-making and citizen science be combined in an ecopedagogical arts-

integrated curriculum for student engagement with the Chicago River?

● What are the learning outcomes when students create and use their own devices to

collect organic matter from the Chicago River to produce works of art?

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Literature Review

This study connects different aspects of citizen science, arts-based research, and

ecopedagogy into one workbook that can be used and modified by any educator looking to

do programming on local waterways in their community.While much of the literature

analyzes the role these three subjects play in recent educational and engagement

programming, it lacks analysis of non-traditional and indigenous forms of engagement with

local waterways. This study examines approaches to citizen science, arts-based research, and

ecopedagogy within recent geopolitical movements to create environmental educational

models, with a specific lens toward the effects of these approaches on our current educational

structure in the United States.

The model of environmental education for the United States began within the first

decade of the 20th century when educators viewed environmental education as any type of

education that took place outdoors rather than indoors within the walls of an institution, such

as a school building. (Quay & Seaman, 2013) A significant amount of literature exists

examining educational approaches stemming from this period of outdoor education, or

experiential education, and much of it will be analyzed in this chapter as it set the foundation

for environmental education and ecopedagogies commonly used today. This is especially

true in an age when climate change and the creation of environmental education models has

become a geopolitical discussion point since the 1970s. (Monroe & Krasny, 2016) These

approaches and analyses were primarily focused on less-structured lesson planning to allow

the experience of being outdoors to encourage students to take agency and time to process

their lessons learned from outdoor education. For example, through reflecting on decades of

experiential programming, Knapp (2011) discussed the importance of being outdoors and

experiencing nature to gain understanding on deeper meanings in our lives.

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More recent environmental educational approaches built upon this foundation of

experiential education by incorporating socio-economic factors in order to discuss the

issues of environmental access and racism present in different areas. For example,

Huffington and Scott (2021) investigated the ways teachers operating in low

socioeconomic rural areas that are historically impacted by environmental issues can

become more critically engaged with the environments they teach their students about.

This method incorporated the use of citizen science, a method of data collection that

includes members of the local community, which is a useful tool when it comes to

increasing both educator and student agency over the science lessons offered through

environmental education. Other educators have incorporated art-making into their

environmental education lesson planning to deeply connect students with their

environments. For example, Anderson and Guyas (2012) discuss principles that art

instructors could use to help them connect their students with environmental issues on a

more personal level. Because of the various methods that have changed the way educators

discuss environmental education, this literature review will span across multiple

disciplines. The bodies of scholarship that inform this investigation include (a) examples

of various forms of community-engaged research and databasing, or citizen science, (b) the

use of arts-based research to increase student empowerment and agency related to

addressing socioeconomic issues, and (c) implementation of ecopedagogical praxis within

contemporary education.

CITIZEN SCIENCE: COMMUNITY-ENGAGED RESEARCH METHODS

A term first coined by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989, citizen science is a

recent method of research that is being used globally for community-engaged research.

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Citizen science refers to the collaboration between scientific researchers and the general

public of a specific geographic area to database, catalog, and research to advance knowledge

for science and society (Vohland et al, 2021; Thompson & Arceneaux 2019). Historically,

the contributions of the general public to scientific research were largely done invisibly as

people who may have contributed towards data collection without being involved with the

research team would likely not co-author publications or appear in acknowledgments

(Vohland et al., 2021). In the late 20th century, researchers carrying out scientific studies

began to notice that due to the proliferation of access to technology and the growing

visibility of citizen scientists, a new movement must be made to qualify and legitimize the

various people who may have contributed to the collection of data during a scientific study.

This gave birth to the development of citizen science as it is known and used in research

today.

Since the first definition of citizen science, researchers have used the framework

established by its definition as a tool to diversify and expand the roles that the public can

play in data collection for scientific research. For example, Marres and Lazaun (2011)

investigated and created devices that were meant to be used by the public for data collection,

with an emphasis on making tools that are easy to construct, accessible to large portions of

the population, and relatively cheap in materials required for construction. This form of

citizen science not only investigated the role that public populations played in the collection

of data, but also investigated the tools that were used by the public to contribute to scientific

research.

While some were investigating the possibilities of devices and tools that can be used

for citizen science, others were interested in the relationship between those collecting data

and those carrying out the research. Thompson and Arceneaux (2019) created models for

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citizen science that fostered a give-and-take relationship, offering methods for researchers to

use citizen science in a way that engages the community and allows them to participate in

the planning process. These models encouraged the general public to participate in the urban

planning process through recognition of the powers at play in society and how they impact

decision-making within communities. Accessibility has also been examined, with many

thinking of ways to engage populations with tools that many locals are already familiar with,

such as Lemmens et al. (2021), who investigated how mobile and web apps can be used to

further citizen science in the modern age. All these initiatives in citizen science have been

taken to increase the accessibility of science and to create a method for databasing and

cataloging within research so that modern research models can use the general public in a

mutually beneficial relationship. These methods allow for more accurate data models and to

discourage parachute research, or researchers gathering their data with the help of a

community and then abandoning the community once the data collection has been

completed.

With the proliferation of citizen science work being carried out across the academic

world, researchers sought a way to categorize the different forms of citizen science that were

taking place. Haklay (2021) dissected the different forms of citizen science into seven

distinct categorizations: (1) passive sensing, (2) volunteer computing, (3) volunteer thinking,

(4) environmental and ecological observations, (5) participatory sensing, (6)

community/civic science, and (7) do-it-yourself (DIY) science (p. 26).

As more researchers began to use and define the work being done under the term

citizen science, other researchers began to utilize this method as a tool for locals to

investigate their local ecosystems and monitor pollution within local environments. For

example, Liboiron et al. (2016) observed no established means of investigating plastic

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bioaccumulation within cod caught for local consumption. The research team decided to

work with local Newfoundland fisheries to collect data on plastic ingestion within the cod

caught as a means to gauge how common microplastic accumulation was within a local

marine food web. Examples like this provide a model for environmental researchers to

partner with local businesses and communities to utilize a means of mass data collection that

was previously established outside of academia.

As the global environment continues to shift under climate change, there has been an

increased push in the need for environmental-based citizen science projects. Students are

seeing the devastating effects of climate change occurring in the form of increasingly

occurring extreme weather events, record-breaking global ocean temperatures, and mass

ecosystem depletion, causing a generational fear of the future of our planet. Yet as citizen

science projects became more prevalent for environmental studies, many would continue to

identify challenges and barriers to conducting citizen science work. A common critique of

the utilization of citizen science is that it is commonly done through volunteer work, and it

may be seen as a renewed neoliberal approach to exploit members of the general public by

making them work for free, especially when data is a key asset in the current modern age

(Vohland et al., 2021). Yet even those critical of citizen science challenges agree that there is

large potential for citizen science models to increase the accessibility and accuracy of current

scientific research. There is also an expressed need for citizen science to consider the

critiques against it and for changes to take place, with Conrad and Hilchey (2011)

concluding in their study of community-based environmental models,

Although recommendations have been made to overcome the challenges of

organizational struggles, improper data collection, and data use; the success of the

recommendations, best practices, and associated framework should be identified and

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evaluated. Particular focus on increasing use of data by decision makers and

scientists; and how that use influences conservation, would be particularly valuable.

(p. 284)

ARTS-BASED RESEARCH, EMPOWERMENT, & TRUTH

There is a long history of researchers utilizing arts-based research methods as a

means of qualitative research inquiry. Many researchers who engage in arts-based research

credit the social rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s as a time when quantitative

researchers were examining past forms of research and questioning what was missing. As

more populations who were previously ignored in research began to be sought out for

meaningful inclusion, people sought out new forms of research that were previously not

studied (Leavy, 2020). Eisner (1981) wrote on the possibilities of utilizing artistic

approaches to qualitative research during this time period,

Artistic approaches to research are less concerned with the discovery of truth than

with the creation of meaning. What art seeks is not the discovery of the laws of nature

about which true statements, or explanations can be given, but rather the creation of

images that people will find meaningful and from which their fallible and tentative

views of the world can be altered, rejected, or made more secure. Truth implies

singularity and monopoly. Meaning implies relativism and diversity. (p. 9)

Eisner discussed the possibility of using artistic approaches to research as a way of deriving

meaning rather than truth. Whereas quantitative forms of research had looked at a way of

objectively understanding certain laws and objective truths, qualitative forms were looked at

as a way to test and expand our understanding beyond tangible forms. These two forms of

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research, both scientific and artistic, were never meant to be at odds with one another, but

rather are tools to illuminate aspects of the human condition.

From this mode of inquiry came about a new research term, arts-based research.

According to Barone and Eisner (2012), there are two criteria to evaluate whether or not

research is arts-based research. The first criterion is that arts-based research must be

engaged in for a purpose often associated with an artistic activity. Second, arts-based

research is defined by the presence of certain aesthetic qualities or design elements that

infuse the inquiry process and the research (p. 95). Both authors make a point to say that it

could be argued these elements are present in any form of educational research, therefore

the more pronounced both qualities are in research, the more the research done may be

categorized as arts-based.

One way that arts-based research has been utilized as a way of capturing meaning

rather than truth was carried out by social justice movements who began to use the reframing

of research as a means of claiming power within the academic sphere that they previously

did not have. For example, Ristock and Pennell (1996) wrote on the use of research as

empowerment within feminist studies. This meant examining the power structures of any

study carried out at every step of the research process as a way to critically analyze

responsible uses of power. They sought to examine power by asking questions that examined

oppressive power structures of relationships between researchers and research subjects.

Utilizing a feminist lens, the questions and ways of thinking put to use by Ristock and

Pennell were a way of critically examining truth that had been accepted for so long within

academia, and a push towards alternate truths which could only become illuminated through

the inclusion of diverse experiences. This inspired empowerment among feminist

researchers, as they now had a framework for questioning the patriarchal barriers deeply

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rooted in academic research.

At the turn of the 21st century, many educators began to use arts-based research

strategies for classroom learning that could stretch students’ understandings by offering a

means of discovering these alternate truths. Marshal and D’Adamo (2011) write on this

phenomenon of art practice as research in the classroom, creating models for teachers to use

for facilitating arts-based research. Both authors detail a method for the creation of a

research notebook that students can use for creating and engaging with artworks using a

process of describe, analyze, reflect, and connect (DARC). This work was carried out in an

International Baccalaureate (IB) art program at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, CA.

After analyzing the effects of a research notebook in the classroom, the authors concluded

that,

This disposition toward learning can permeate all aspects of a young person’s life at

school, and in his or her life beyond school as well. It allows young people to see

knowledge not as something previously or fully established, but instead as something

incomplete on which to create something new, something of their own. In generating

all of this the deep learning and understanding; the transferable thinking and research

skills; and the dispositions toward research, learning, and autonomy—we believe art

practice-as-research has great potential for transforming the way we conceptualize,

construct, and practice art education. This is a paradigm with power. (p. 18)

Marshal and D’Adamo discuss a new form of educational empowerment. Arts can now be

seen as a supplement to formal science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)

education rather than a separate area of study. Through arts-based research, students can gain

agency and autonomy over their education and apply that new sense of autonomy to their

other areas of study by questioning the objective truths present in these forms of learning.

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This empowerment through education offered by arts-based education helped shift the

perception of arts inclusion among formal STEM education, with many educators referring to

STEM education as STEAM education to acknowledge this inclusion of arts practice in

education (Liao, 2016).

As arts-based research gained traction as an educational tool, there became a desire to

catalog a stream of methods from the various works described as arts-based research that

were being carried out by artists and researchers. Sinner et al. (2006) compiled and analyzed

30 dissertations from the University of British Columbia (UBC) between 1994 and 2004 in

order to compare methodologies and modes of inquiry utilized by researchers. The research

used a framing method established through the community of practice at UBC that they

called a/r/tography. The methodology of a/r/tography is described as a hybrid, practice-based

form of methodology that was heavily influenced by the arts-based research that was

happening at this point in time. Because they had taken the time to create and engage with

their own form of arts-based research as a/r/tography, UBC researchers found they had a

large swath of dissertations using this form of research to evaluate. The results of their study

provided a model for how doctorate students could utilize practices and processes of arts-

based research, how graduate students could theorize arts-based educational research, and

how these studies connected with arts, learning environments, curricula, and other

disciplines.

As more researchers and educators employed arts-based research in their work, some

began to question the use of arts-based research and the ways in which people approached

this type of work. O’Donoghue (2009) was one of the critics of arts-based research being

carried out, questioning the use of arts-based research in the past, and arguing that it has been

too narrowly focused on qualitative aspects of art-making rather than examining the practices

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and theories of art from a more traditional point of view. O’Donoghue argued that addressing

the social conditions that produce beliefs about art is essential and that arts-based researchers

need to work more diligently with the practices and theories of art to address the

epistemological, ontological, and existential tensions that reside at the core of arts-based

research. O’Donoghue also brings up responsibility and how engaging in arts-based research

by educators requires a thoughtful analysis of what we are attempting to answer.

A commitment to the arts as an approach to educational research brings many

challenges, but equally it brings responsibilities. It requires us to think deeply

about how we understand, articulate, and engage in educational research; how

we ask and hope to answer questions, as well as the types of questions we might

ask. (p. 366)

O’Donogue concluded by saying that arts-based researchers needed to consider the

relationship between their practices and the practices of artists as a way to advance arts-based

research and help solidify it as a way of conducting research within the professional arts

world.

Some researchers have suggested that the forms of learning addressed through arts-

based research could be a useful tool for addressing the current climate crisis and changing

our relationship with the planet. For example, Anderson and Guyas (2012) discuss different

activities that can be done by students to help them deal with the climate crisis. Arts-based

research practices inspire these activities by emphasizing the importance of students’ sensual

experiences, integration of previous experiences, development of perceptions through

observation, and embodied experiences. There are many different types of activities that the

authors suggest to achieve a more sensorial environmental experience, such as nature

drawing, visual and written journals, and Miksang photography. These types of activities

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suggest that arts-based practice can be combined with environmental ways of thinking, and

may even be a tool that can be used to increase agency and voice at a time when many

students are feeling unsure about the future of the planet due to talks of an incoming climate

catastrophe.

ECOPEDAGOGY WITHIN ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

With the proliferation of environmental education resources that propped up in the

turn of the 21st century, there has been even further examination of the different forms of

environmental education that educators have taken on. One common form of education that

became prevalent in the early 2000s was education for sustainable development, with the UN

ushering in a Decade of Sustainable Development in 2005 (Kahn, 2008). Sustainable

development is a term that can be traced back to 1980, when the World Conservation

Strategy was created by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN),

which was funded by the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization

(UNESCO). From this, the Brundtland Report was drafted seven years later in 1987. The

Brundtland Report contains the most widely used definition of sustainable development,

stating within the document that, “Humanity has the ability to make development

sustainable—to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the

ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (Monroe & Krasney, 2016, p. 9). This

definition of sustainable development caused a push in the late 20th century to create

educational models with a sustainable framework in mind. However, many were critical of

education for sustainable development. In a study conducted by Jickling and Wals (2008)

investigating the effect of globalizing forces such as UNESCO and their effects on

environmental educational programming, they concluded,

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We find that the sustainable development agenda within environmental education is

problematic. We view education for sustainable development as a product and a

carrier of globalizing forces. This globalizing agenda has instrumental and

deterministic tendencies that favour transmissive arrangements for teaching and

learning over more transformative ones. In the process, traditional (e.g.

environmental education) and alternative (e.g. eco-justice) ways of engaging people

in existential questions about the way human beings and other species live on this

Earth run the risk of being marginalized or excluded. The same holds true for

individuals and communities wishing to deal with such questions in a self-

determined, relatively autonomous, and contextually grounded way. (p. 18)

The criticisms written here were commonly discussed regarding environmental educational

policy. Many agreed it was effective at teaching people about environments and the

worldwide effects of pollution, yet it did little to offer wide-scale political and social

solutions that could enact real change in creating a world that fosters a healthy planet and

livelihoods for people everywhere. While these discussions were happening on a geopolitical

scale, other educational philosophers were questioning the types of programs being created

using this messaging. One such philosopher was Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educational

philosopher who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Through this writing, Freire argued for a

more empathetic and humanitarian approach to education, one which argues for equality for

all and access to education for all. Ecopedagogy is an educational approach inspired by the

pedagogy of the oppressed that was laid out by Freire. As Kahn (2008) writes,

Ecopedagogy seeks to interpolate quintessentially Freirean aims of humanization and

social justice with a future-oriented ecological politics that radically opposes the

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globalization of neoliberalism and imperialism, on the one hand, and which attempts

to foment collective ecoliteracy and realize culturally relevant forms of knowledge

grounded in normative concepts such as sustainability, planetarity, and biophilia, on

the other. (p. 8)

Though not directly in contrast to the tenets and principles outlined in sustainable

development education, ecopedagogy drives lessons rooted in sustainable development

further by asking problem-posing questions such as what is development?; who is

development for?; who defines development?; and, how does development affect the rest of

nature? (Misiaszek, 2020).

By asking these types of questions about environmental policy and action,

ecopedagogy seeks to address the rapid globalization that is occurring both economically and

socially. This is a pedagogy that directly addresses the criticisms of sustainable development

that were pointed out by Jickling and Wals (2008). Especially within urban environments,

environments that are more likely to suffer the consequences of mass industrialization,

pollution and waste, and environmental racism, many programs approached environmental

education through this lens as a way to directly address who is and is not being serviced by

sustainable development models. On top of the historical environmental issues that have been

and continue to be present within American cities, environmental education may be difficult

for those living within urban environments due to the lack of green spaces present in said

areas. One example of possible ways to address this gap in environmental education was

carried out by Bruyere, Wesson, and Teel (2012) when they conducted a study within an

after-school program in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City. This qualitative study

investigated the interest in and barriers to environmental education within that neighborhood

as well as the effects of training carried out with environmental educators in the after-school

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program which were derived from the results of the first part of the same study. The authors

found that listening to input from parents living in the community as well as students who

were looking to take the course, and implementing that feedback into training programs to

address issues that were revealed was successful. The authors go further to discuss that the

desire for resources on environmental education are present in these urban spaces. The

success of this study suggests that the barriers present in current sustainable development

models are surmountable when the effort is put in to listen and understand the concerns of

the community and the barriers members of the community have encountered.

When thinking of addressing these issues, education on watersheds and waterways

can be a way to bring more environmental education within urban settings. Urban

environments commonly are found along watersheds and waterways in the U.S. due to the

ease of access to naval forms of transportation. There are many examples of watershed

programming that have taken place in the Midwest (Hougham et al., 2020), but there still

exists a large need for programming on watersheds within urban environments. There is

much potential for programming to reach students who may have little to no access to local

green spaces or local waterways. If we want to approach environmental education with an

ecopedagogical lens, more discussion should be had regarding how to create more

programming for students within urban environments with an emphasis on communal

engagement to eliminate barriers to said educational programming.

SUMMARY

Citizen science, arts-based research, and ecopedagogical approaches to

environmental education are all recent movements that have strengths and challenges

associated with their quickly expanding use in their respective fields. Though much

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literature exists that studies the use of these strategies as these have been implemented

(Conrad & Hilchey, 2011; Voghland et al. 2022; Sinner et al. 2006; Monroe & Krasny,

2006), there is still room for all areas to grow and for new educational models to take place.

The workbook that I produced as part of my research used aspects of all three

disciplines as one way to suggest advancement within these topics. The workbook provides

various lessons for engagement on the river that encourage a problem-posing method of

learning, allowing the students to guide the learning process based on what they take

particular interest in and make their own discoveries. It then provides resources for going

further with their discoveries by encouraging the use of apps that use citizen science to carry

out scientific research. This gives students the potential to contribute to scientific research

and global cataloging based on the discoveries they make on their own.

As more and more younger students express concern over the future of the planet due

to the effects of climate change on all of the earth’s environments, there is a continued need

for this type of programming to be investigated and expanded upon (Hickman et al., 2021).

By making the workbook open access, it is an accessible tool intended for use by all

educators looking to conduct this type of work on urban watersheds and waterways

throughout the United States and beyond. The hope is by creating this type of open-access

activities and curricula, more educators will be inspired and empowered to carry out this

work on outdoor spaces near their classrooms and accessible to their community to help

understand and advocate for legislation that protects and increases accessibility for our local

environments.

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Methodology

This study used an action-based mixed methodology that included collaboration with

local organizations and community members throughout Chicago. The lessons contained

within the workbook were first drafted as part of a Summer Water Lab run by SAIC

Environmental Science professor Sarah Zhou Rosengard during the summer of 2023. This

water lab involved four SAIC students, including myself, and one student from Northeastern

Illinois University. The students were brought into the lab as they had expressed interest in

investigating arts-integrated lessons involving engagement with local waterways. Participants

in the lab met approximately every other week to discuss ideas and inspirations that could

lead to potential lessons carried out.

Once lessons were developed and drafted, the lab group then worked with a local

non-profit summer camp organization Project REACH to execute the lessons with student

participants over the course of two weeks. The REACH summer camp cohort consisted of

approximately 20 campers between the ages of 12 and 18. All were immigrants or refugees

who had recently moved to Chicago, most of them being from Venezuela, with a few also

being from Mexico, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. From this execution of

the lessons, the lab group was able to test and receive feedback on these lessons. Subsequent

meetings within the lab group after this first trial led to lesson adjustments based on our

observations and notes from campers and counselors at Project REACH.

The lab then partnered with Urban Rivers in the fall of 2023 to carry out two

workshop sessions on Urban River’s Wild Mile. During the fall of 2023, the Wild Mile

consisted of approximately 0.25 miles of publicly accessible boardwalk on the surface of the

Chicago River. These workshop sessions were free, open to the public, and publicized

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through Urban Rivers. One workshop was carried out as a microbe art night while the other

workshop was carried out as a community science informative session. Both workshops

allowed the lab group to test out the lessons after we had made adjustments from our work

with Project REACH and gave us a new set of students to engage with these activities.

Based on the successful responses from participants at both workshops carried out

through Urban Rivers, they expressed an interest in using these lessons to bring school

groups to the Wild Mile. Urban Rivers had already begun to collaborate and form

connections with many different schools throughout Chicago. They expressed a desire to use

these lessons as part of their school programming. I sought to give them these lessons in a

format that would allow them to advertise to the desired school groups throughout Chicago

as well as communicate the lessons to interested school teachers who were potential

collaborators to Urban Rivers.

The lab group stopped meeting after the workshop sessions were completed and I

began to meet with the staff members at Urban Rivers to create this workbook of activities.

We met approximately every other month to discuss progress and thoughts on the lessons'

contents and the workbook's display. From all of these meetings, trial periods, and

collaborations, the workbook was born.

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Story

I knelt by the edge of the water with my algae collector, a handmade device

consisting of nylon sewn shut on one end and sewn onto the metal ring of a glass jar top on

the other. After locking eyes with my rippling reflection, I glanced along the lake’s surface,

attempting to locate an algae target. Not much scanning led me to identify one target within

arms’ reach. I slowly began to lower my collector into the lake until the open mouth

skimmed the surface of the lake, a trail of nylon slowly dancing behind it in the water. As I

skimmed, the tips of my fingers lightly touched the surface of the water, and I felt the water

warmly roll along my fingertips. The sun shined right on me, and surrounding me were

roughly twenty campers, all performing the same task.

This experience was one of many I encountered over the summer of 2023 when I

volunteered with the Refugee Education & Adventure Challenge (REACH) Summer Camp

in Chicago, Illinois. I was connected to the work of REACH through the SAIC Water Lab,

which I was a part of during the summer of 2023. This lab was led by a science professor at

SAIC, Sarah Rosengard, as well as three other SAIC students and myself. Sarah is not a

typical SAIC instructor, and this was what drew me to her work. Rather than having a

background in artistic forms, Sarah had an environmental science background, conducting

research on water ecology throughout the planet. She joined SAIC to help think of creative

ways to inform and educate the public about our climate. The activities we did were curated

in our lab to help the campers establish a sense of place here in Chicago through engagement

with the ecosystem embedded within the city’s topography. For this task, we collected matter

samples from a local pond and created cyanotypes with the samples we gathered. Cyanotypes

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are pictures created from a light-sensitive chemical that, when covered, can create outlines of

the materials you use on the paper.

Once we had completed collecting our plant matter out of the lake, we used

cyanotype paper to create lovely artwork of the materials we had collected while skimming

the lake’s surface. As the cyanotypes developed sitting out in the sun, I watched the campers

interact. I saw some campers playing catch with a football, others sitting with their phone in

hand, heads bowed toward whatever content they were consuming, and some simply running

around with no clear objective. It was a warm, beautiful day in Chicago, and as I sat in this

field, I began to reflect and question, “How did I get so lucky to end up here?” As I looked

around at the campers engaging with the pond and playing in the forest preserve, another less

optimistic question came into my head: “Is this enough?”

Bringing This Work to the Chicago River

The Chicago River is a prime spot for ecopedagogical education as it is a living

document of environmental racism and mass industrial pollution. As part of my research, my

goal was to create a workbook that could incorporate arts integration, citizen science through

public cataloging of materials, and sustainable development in a series of accessible

ecopedagogical lessons intended to be carried out on the Chicago River. By having students

not only create works of art but also investigate and document what they notice in the river,

they can begin to understand the structures and organisms that are present in Chicago’s

environment, as well as think critically about what can be observed within the river’s habitats

and the strategies which have been implemented to help sustain those structures and

organisms.

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The experience of being on the water and creating works of art from said experience

can help students connect critically to their local environments and think of resources and

strategies that can be implemented to help mitigate ongoing climate change. This type of

arts-based ecological thinking has been demonstrated by educators before, such as Anderson

and Guyas (2012), who encouraged the creation of nature drawings, visual and written

journals, and Miksang photography pictures.

Near the end of my research, I worked with a local river restoration non-profit

organization, Urban Rivers, to give them this workbook to use on the Chicago River with

similar goals to the REACH programming that was curated by myself and the rest of the

SAIC Water Lab in summer 2023. We had used some of these lessons already with Urban

Rivers during the fall of 2023 when Urban Rivers hosted various “Community Nights” in

which anybody could come to the Wild Mile and partake in the activities. The community

driven aspect of Urban Rivers inspired me. There was no cost of entry, suggested donation,

or even passive attempts to gain donations in exchange for people partaking in these

activities. All members of the group were happy to have people be interested in the river.

Though the workbook was designed with school groups in mind, my hope is these activities

can also be used during future community science nights to inspire everyone to become

students of the Chicago River.

The inclusion of the restorative group Urban Rivers allows the lessons to go beyond

simply engaging with our environment. From this workbook, Urban Rivers can send out

these lessons to potential school teachers interested in bringing their school groups to the

Wild Mile and they can make the workbook accessible to all who come to their community

nights on the Wild Mile. By engaging students and residents with a restored version of the

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Chicago River, they can begin to understand the history of pollution that has gone into this

essential watershed and the process of sustainable design that is being carried out to undo

over a century of industrial waste pollution. They can then investigate and discuss why the

river was located as a source of mass pollution, who is receiving sustainable development on

the river, what areas of the city are serviced by restored river spaces, and what areas of the

city are not receiving any sustainable development and why that might be.

Creating lessons that encourage experiential learning within our natural environments

is one way to help students think critically about the climate catastrophe. My hope is by

creating and sharing this workbook with one of the river restoration groups in Chicago,

Urban Rivers, I can help students here in the city learn how they can engage with the nature

that is present even within urban spaces. I also hope this workbook will serve as inspiration

for other educators looking to help their students think critically about their own

environments throughout the world.

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Figure 1. A student holds a handmade Secchi Disk (a device used to measure water turbidity)

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Figure 2. A student displays their completed cyanotype.

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Figure 3. Members of the SAIC Water Lab (including myself) sit near drying Cyanotypes.

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Figure 4. Promotional poster created to advertise one of Urban Rivers’ community events

that consisted of the lab groups lessons.

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Reflections and Recommendations

During the final periods of developing the workbook, I met with Phil Nicodemus, the

founder of Urban Rivers, to discuss with him the process and goals of developing this

workbook for his group to use on the Chicago River. Our conversation came onto the topic of

the future of the Chicago River and what the future might look like:

There's two versions of it. We're at a really critical inflection point with all

these industries having moved off the river. They all lived on the river. The

whole river system was engineered for their benefit and purposes. They're

slowly and steadily moving off the river and what's replacing them is

generally residential and commercial. There are two ways that this can

happen. One way is if things continue kind of as the system is set up now,

where each property as it gets redeveloped is kind of done in a vacuum. It's

piece by piece…The worst-case scenario is you've got all these tiny little

pockets of everyone trying to do their own individual thing and everything is

uncreative and it's functioning as a basic walkway and then places where

industry is still going to use it are gonna be able to keep people off of their

property arguing that, you know, this is unsafe or whatever…The best-case

scenario is that the city really leans into it. Builds itself some more tools to

enforce something like this and then makes the riverfront the next version of

the lakefront, right?...Where every part of the riverfront is totally publicly

accessible. It has just as many access points and areas to be passing through.

You can have shops and you can have things that are off street and kind of

create this pedestrian network and have a complimentary bike network nearby

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that kind of moves people through, you know. More public transportation. It

can be really good urbanism on top of being really really beneficial to the way

that people interact with the river. But then also improve the health of the

river overall and add back these wildlife spaces. (P. Nicodemus, personal

communication, 22 March 2024)

This is why this work becomes important. If what Nicodemus is saying is true, and

we currently lie within a critical point of the future of the Chicago River, then educators must

be able to create and execute lessons that ignite curiosity and desire for experiencing the river

for students throughout the city. Yet how can educators do this if there is limited access to

the river? How can we go beyond bringing students to the section of the river that is currently

publicly accessible and encourage ways to think about building up the river so that it can

become this token of urbanism that Nicodemus believes it can be?

Creating lessons inspired by the tenants of ecopedagogy - that everyone should have

access to a livable and healthy environment - is one way to begin to address this issue.

However, to say a lesson is rooted in ecopedagogy is one thing. To actually have a lesson

exploring all aspects of ecopedagogy is another. As these lessons begin to be carried out on

the Chicago River, educators and myself must be aware of students’ responses to these

lessons and be willing and able to adapt the lessons as needed. Are students engaging with

the river in a way that inspires them to find their own place to get to the river near where they

live? Are students questioning why the river has a negative connotation among many people

throughout the city? Are students investigating and wondering about what the quality and

access of the river says about the socioeconomic demographics of a specific area of the city?

If we are unsatisfied with the answer to these questions, or if we are unable to answer these

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questions as we carry out the lessons on the river, then we must dig deeper into what is not

connecting with the students and adjust the lessons accordingly. A gap between our

objectives as educators and the actual results of the lesson should not be viewed as a failure

of the lessons, but rather a way to generate new knowledge and understandings of how we

can make these lessons stronger. That is why I plan on having this workbook be a living

document. It should constantly be changing and be adapted by different educators to fit the

needs of their students at any particular moment. As the river and city changes, so too should

the workbook.

There should also be a particular focus on who is carrying out these lessons and what

students are able to partake in these activities. If we are noticing that only one type of

educator is carrying out this work, or if we are noticing that only students from a particular

section of the city are coming out to engage in these lessons, then we should be able to

perform a self-critique to dig into why this is happening and make the necessary changes to

ensure that everyone is able to do this work if they want to do it.

Part of it is just demonstrating, you know, here's the effects. Here's the

positive effects that what you're doing can have and here's the consequence of

not doing it. Right? Like here's how you suffer when we ignore this kind of

stuff. And so I think it's kind of that two prong approach of getting people to

realize what they're losing out on by not having this river be this beautiful

resource, but then also demonstrating here's the things that you can directly do

and here's how they matter and here's what happens. Here's what we've

learned over these years of working on this and here's a reason to feel good

about pushing for more of this. (P. Nicodemus, personal communication, 22

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March 2024)

The goal that Nicodemus describes here is the goal that should always be centered

when doing this work - does engaging with restoring spaces and creating work from it make

students interested in the Chicago River? Does this activate the history of the river and show

why it is significant and important to how the entire city was built up and designed? If

students are not becoming more interested in the river and invested in the environments that

create their community then these lessons are not successful and some evaluation will need to

be taken on how to make these lessons more relevant to the students who are participating in

them. It is one thing if the students show up not caring about the Chicago River. It is another

if they leave and continue to be uninterested in it.

The hope is that by being on the river and engaging with it, the students will begin to

ask their own questions about the river and its history and these questions will drive further

discovery by the students. We, as educators, need to be honest with ourselves and with the

results of the lessons if we want the lessons to be effective when we come back and evaluate

the success of the lessons after they have been carried out. This work doesn’t end when the

students leave, and the river is not the only place that this work can be carried out.

FUTURES

In the spring of 2024, while completing this work, I also became a Public

Engagement Facilitator at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. So while I plan on continuing to

assess and adjust these lessons as needed based on the factors discussed above, I am also

wondering how we can ignite passion and curiosity for local water systems while within the

walls of a large, historically acclaimed cultural space. What might this kind of work look like

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within an aquarium’s daily programming? How can we encourage people to advocate for

access while at a place that has been prioritized for environmental access for many years?

What drives curiosity around local water systems without creating a feeling of “talking

down” to our audience? These are also questions I’m wondering as I shift into this new way

of carrying out lessons and programming throughout Chicago.

Of course, Urban Rivers and this workbook are only one piece to the puzzle. If the

ultimate goal is to create equitable access to clean riverfront for everyone within the city of

Chicago, there are other groups whose work is worth mentioning. Groups such as the Little

Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), The Freshwater Lab at UIC

(University of Illinois Chicago), Friends of the Chicago River, and countless residents of the

city of Chicago all play a pivotal role in helping to shape the future of the Chicago River

through research, advocacy, and restoration that all are needed to ensure that the river

continues to be built up as a place for all residents and visitors of the city to be able to access.

Ultimately, if we want the river to be available for everyone to use and enjoy, we

need to make sure we continue to advocate and educate about it. If we want the city to truly

use our environmental resources for being a model of urbanism to the world, the time is now

to start doing so. These lessons are one way to do that, but not the only way. I encourage and

hope that educators with other forms of expertise continue to investigate the answer to these

questions so that we can create a riverfront that is for all the people of Chicago, not just a

select few.

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Appendix A

Appendix A. Lesson plan for trash pickup along the river bank or on a river boardwalk

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Appendix B

Appendix B. Lesson plan for macroinvertebrate investigation

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Appendix C

Appendix C. Lesson plan for using microscopes to investigate river water

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Appendix D

Appendix D. Lesson Plan for creating a matter collector

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Appendix E

Appendix E. Lesson plan for making cyanotypes from materials gathered off the surface of

the river

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Appendix F

Appendix F. Lesson plan for making a Secchi Disk - a device that is used to test for turbidity

in water

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Appendix G

Appendix G. Lesson plan for creating seed bombs filled with seeds of native plants that can

be tossed/catapulted into the river